Venice, Italy

VENICE, ITALY | "La Serenissima"

Venice is the most audacious urban achievement in history — a city of 400 islands connected by 150 canals and 400 bridges, built entirely on wooden piles driven into the lagoon floor of the northern Adriatic over a thousand years of continuous construction, and maintained against the tides and the acqua alta floods of the Venetian lagoon through an engineering effort that has never ceased since the first refugees from the Lombard invasions settled the islands in the 5th century CE. At its medieval peak Venice was the wealthiest city in the world, controlling the spice trade between Europe and the East from its position at the mouth of the Adriatic, and the Venetian Gothic architecture of the Doge's Palace, the Byzantine mosaics of St Mark's Basilica, and the Renaissance palazzos lining the Grand Canal are the physical record of that extraordinary commercial and cultural power.

The colors are the specific palette of reflected water and aged stone: the deep terracotta of the brick palazzos, the warm cream of the Istrian stone facades, the deep green of the canal water at midday, the gold of the mosaics catching the light inside the Basilica, and the extraordinary silver of the lagoon at dawn when the city is empty and the vaporettos have not yet begun.